Ramblings from the creator of HomeSite, TopStyle, FeedDemon and Glassboard Android.

Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Extending FeedDemon: Customize the "Send To" Menu

If you've used FeedDemon for a while, you're probably familiar with the "Send To" menu, which enables sending a post to an external service such as Digg or del.icio.us. But you probably don't know that you can extend this menu (because, well, I've never mentioned it before!).

Each external service in this menu is contained in its own XML file which is located in FeedDemon's \Data\SendTo subfolder. Adding a new service is as easy as creating a new XML file in this folder which tells FeedDemon what to do with the post.

The format of these XML files is pretty simple. Here's the "Send To" file for del.icio.us, which is installed with FeedDemon:

As you can see, there's a single XML element named fdsendto which contains two attributes:

service - the name of the service as it should appear in the menu

template - the URL that FeedDemon should send the post to

The template relies on tokens which are translated to data from the actual post before FeedDemon passes it to the external service. Here's a list of the supported tokens:

{url} = the URL the post links to

{title} = the title of the post

{description} = the full description of the post including HTML tags

{description-plain} = the full description of the post with HTML tags stripped

{summary} = the summary (excerpt) of the post including HTML tags

{summary-plain} = the summary with HTML tags strips

The del.icio.us example above also contains a {user} token, which tells FeedDemon to ask for the user's name on the external service (this usually isn't necessary, but some services do require a username before posting via a URL). FeedDemon remembers the username after it's supplied, but you can edit or remove this username by clicking the "Passwords" button in FeedDemon's options then switching to the "Services" page.

Of course, you may not want to go through the effort of creating your own "Send To" XML files, in which case, check out these posts from two of FeedDemon's power users:

I really wish the SendTo function was available from the toolbar--so I could use it when viewing a full blog entry (which is typically how I read posts.) That way I could easily blog information I find useful.